Editor,
New Mexico Sen. Jerry Ortiz y Pino's bill to ban aspartame in New Mexico may end up being scuttled this week in the Senate Public Affairs Committee because of an analysis by Assistant Attorney General Zach Shandler. The analysis essentially throws in the towel, agreeing that the Food and Drug Administration's approval of aspartame pre-empts and prevents any state-level legislative ban on aspartame. However, the Legislature should ban aspartame in order to protect New Mexicans from, for example, brain tumors and multiple sclerosis, which may result from ingesting aspartame.
This cannot be the work of Attorney General Gary King, who has a Ph.D. in organic chemistry. After all, King helped write the bill back when he was an attorney general candidate, and he has a long history of consumer advocacy as former chairman of the House Consumer Affairs Committee. As the legislator who wrote most of the administrative procedures for the New Mexico Board of Pharmacy back in the 1990s, he could understand the medical harm done by this artificial sweetener.
Aspartame is metabolized as methanol and formaldehyde and should never have been approved by the FDA in 1981, when its approval was forced through by then-CEO of G.D. Searle, Donald Rumsfeld, for vast personal fiscal gain.
States and even cities can and must protect themselves and, in fact, do all the time. For example, the FDA approval of artificial trans fats did not prevent New York City from banning them. States have gotten rid of all kinds of things that had been approved by the FDA, the Environmental Protection Agency or other federal agencies. The removal of asbestos and the Vioxx suits in Texas are two examples.
King should defend the rights of states and their obligation to protect the health of their citizens, especially when we have a corporate-manipulated FDA that will facilely rubber-stamp just about whatever ghastly new chemical additive the industry asks it to approve.
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There are hundreds of millions of lives at stake because of the neurodegenerative afflictions attributed to aspartame.
The Senate Public Affairs Committee will decide this matter this week, and two senators, Las Cruces Democrat Mary Kay Papen and Albuquerque Democrat Dede Feldman, would vote against this measure easily just because of this pusillanimous analysis from Shandler. We cannot allow this pathetically weak consumer protection stance to ruin or eviscerate the most important consumer protection legislation in the U.S. in 2007.
Stephen Fox
Daily Lobo reader
